John Calvin and the Five Points of Calvinism

Did John Calvin believe the five points of Calvinism? In this brief clip from his teaching series A Survey of Church History, W. Robert Godfrey examines the relationship between John Calvin and the five points of Calvinism. Watch this entire message for free.

Transcript

I think one of the things that's a little sad is that a lot of people when they hear Calvin and they think theology, if they're at all well informed, they think five points of Calvinism. Calvin never talked about five points. That's a later phenomenon. I think Calvin believed the five points of Calvinism but that was not any way in which Calvin thought about what he was doing, what he was believing, what he was teaching. Now it's hard to find a kind of center to Calvin's theology because I really think Calvin labored and was remarkably successful at simply being biblical in his theology. You can’t just lift one doctrine out of the Bible and make it the center of everything if the Bible doesn’t do that. And that's what Calvin tried to avoid doing. He tried to develop a theology that was faithful to the Bible and balanced the way biblical theology is balanced.